Death's Rival

“Go add wood to the coals. Make yourself ready. Clear your mind of useless thoughts and unnecessary pain. I will come.” The door closed in my face. Rudeness from an elder of The People was almost unheard of, but I had a way of pushing people’s buttons. Go, me.

In the back of the windowless hut, hidden from the street, I stripped and hung my clothes on a hook, ran cold water over me from the high spigot, dried off on a clean, coarsely woven length of cloth, and tied it around me. I ducked and entered the low sweathouse, stepping onto the clay floor.

I hadn’t told Aggie what I was, but she knew bits and pieces of my story and probably guessed a lot more. I had originally come here, hoping she could help me find the child that I once had been so very long ago, before Beast, before I lost my memories, before the hunger times, which I remembered only vaguely, and before I was found wandering in the Appalachian Mountains, scared, scarred, naked, and with almost no memory of human language. I kept coming back because she was doing much more than I asked. She was showing me also who I was now.

Finding an elder here in New Orleans shouldn’t have been a surprise—The People lived all over the States— but it still felt like a weird coincidence the universe tossed my way, like scraps to a dog. Like fate or kismet or whatever, though I didn’t believe in any of that stuff.

I stirred the coals and added cedar kindling. Flames rushed up and lit the twigs, sending shadows dancing over the wood walls. Aggie had done some work (or hired it out, but I was betting on her doing it herself) in the sweathouse. She had added some more river rocks to the fire ring, and I pushed them closer to the flames. They were already warm to my hands, but not warm enough for what Aggie wanted. She had replaced the seating. A six-foot-long log had been cut in half lengthwise, sanded smooth on the flat sides, and lacquered until the benches shone. Then they had been placed on low cradle-shaped stands so people could sit on them instead of on the clay floor. These low benches were slightly higher than the old ones. I was guessing that old knees were more comfortable at that height. Maybe she was the president of the local elders, and they held elder meetings here. Assuming she wasn’t the only elder round about. And assuming they held meetings. . . .

I was clouding my mind with inanities. I had a feeling that Aggie would make me wait until she thought I had gotten past that part of the process to make an appearance. “Make yourself ready. Clear your mind of useless thoughts and unnecessary pain.” Yeah. She’d make me wait. I sighed and added more wood. Time passed. The wood crackled and hissed. I moved from the log to the floor, sitting as modestly one could in a sweathouse, and I sweated.

When the coals had burned down and the rocks had taken their heat, I dipped water over them with the hand-carved wooden ladle, from the Cherokee stoneware pitcher that I coveted. Steam rose, and I sweated some more. When the coals were a red glow below a coating of ash, I reached into a woven basket and pulled out a tied bundle of dried herbs, like a very fat cigar: twigs of rosemary, sage, tobacco, which was a new one, a hint of camphor, other things I couldn’t identify, lots of sweetgrass. I set it in the coals. The herbs smoked and the smell filled the sweathouse.

I closed my eyes and dropped into the dark of my own soul. Into the cavernlike place where memories of the Tsalagiyi resided. The firelit, smoky cave of my soul home. I had been here before, in this half-remembered cavern with its sloped ceilings and shifting midnight shadows, with the far-off plink of dripping water and the scent of burning herbs, of the steady beat of a tribal drum, hypnotic and slow.

I heard the door of the sweathouse open, a shaft of light across my lowered lids, quickly darkened as the door closed. Bare feet padded close. Aggie sat across from me in the cavern of my soul home. I couldn’t smell her scent, only sweetgrass and smoke and a single breath of the cool, damp air of the cave of my soul.

Warm, wet heat and darkness surrounded us, steam rising from red coals and heated rocks piled in the center of my spirit place. She started music—drums, steady, resonant. I think I slept. And dreamed.

Long hours later, I heard a voice in my dreams, softer than the quiet drums. “Aquetsi, ageyutsa.” Granddaughter . . . “Tell me what you did not finish.”

My mouth refused to open, as if I was caught in a dream, trapped, trapped, trapped. I sucked in a breath so deep and hard it hurt my ribs. I forced open my lids and they parted sluggishly, revealing Aggie through my tangled eyelashes. Aggie’s eyes were black in the dark, calm and quiet, like deep pools of water in a slow mountain stream. She cocked her head, as if she were a robin staring at a juicy worm. We were no longer in the sweathouse, but in the cave where she took me sometimes, and I didn’t know if this was vision or reality or some esoteric blending of the two.

The drum was deep, a reverberating beat, hollow against the cavern walls of my mind. A heartbeat of sound, steady and soothing. I couldn’t get my mouth to work to ask my question. I didn’t know what to ask.

Aggie smiled into the scented darkness. “You are stubborn. You are full of resentment. Only failure of the worst sort would cause you to resent failure. To fear it. To grow a tough hide that would make you never back down. Only failure.” She reached into the basket and brought out another smudge stick, fat and aromatic even before she held it to the fire. Yellow flames licked out and up, and light caught her copper-colored cheeks and forehead, darkening the shadows at the sides of her mouth, making her look older than she really was. Drawing out her mouth into a muzzle. Like a wolf.

I tried to tense, but my muscles failed me. I tried to push upright, but the world whirled around me as if I were drunk or stoned. Aggie’s mother was ani waya, Wolf Clan, Eastern Cherokee. Her father was Wild Potato Clan, ani godigewi, Western Cherokee. Aggie had magic I had only guessed at. Her snout stretched out. Her shadow on the cavern wall was all wolf. Teeth, wolf teeth, glinted in the firelight.

“My, what big teeth you have, Grandmother,” I mumbled.

I knew I was trapped in a dream when the wolf laughed. She held the smoking smudge stick into the air and saluted the four directions, north, east, south, west, and north again. The trailing smoke made a pale, thinning square in the darkness. “What did you fail at, Dalonige i Digadoli?”

I recalled a vision of shadows on the wall. A man riding a woman. My mother. Remembered the stink of semen and death. The soft cries of fear and pain. The slick feel of cooling blood. “I didn’t kill the killer of my father. I didn’t kill the white men who raped my mother.” I told the story of the fractured memories.

CHAPTER SIX I Never Had a Chance to Say Good-bye

“You were a child of five. You were no match for the white man.” Through my tangled lashes, I saw Aggie One Feather’s wolf snout tilt, like a robin, the motion unsettling, part wolf, part bird, all dream.

“I swore an oath on my father’s blood,” I said. “I wiped it on my face, in promise.”

“Are you certain you failed?” Her head tilted far to the side. “Who did you tell of this great crime? Who did you go to?”

Instantly, I remembered the sharp stick piercing my foot as I ran through the dark, my pale nightgown catching the moonlight through the stalks of corn. The corn towered over my head, the garden never seeming so large in the daylight. Down the hill to my grandmother’s house, the longhouse where she lived with her daughters and their husbands. This was a new memory, and my breath caught before I said, unsteadily, “I went to Uni Lisi, grandmother of many children, Elisi, the mother of my father.” I saw my hand banging on the door. Pounding on it. Saw the door open and the light/heat/brilliant colors blast out. Voices so loud they pulsed against my eardrums. My screaming. The women grabbing up weapons. A hoe. A long knife. My grandmother holding a shotgun. And the long horrible run back through the corn, racing ahead, Elisi letting me lead the way.

In the sweathouse, my heart raced with an uneven beat, like a broken drum, as my body reacted to the memory and its terror. I saw again my mother, in a heap on the ground, naked in the moonlight. The white men gone. The smell of horses. And man stuff. The sound of her crying. The warrior-woman, my grandmother, putting me on a horse, in front of her, and galloping into the night, her arm a band holding me close. The smell of her sweat and her anger. The smell of the pelt she carried. The feel of her beast roiling under her skin— tlvdatsi—mountain lion. Yet the pelt she carried over her shoulder was black.